Can You Imagine the Coverage If It Were Dogs?
By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | April 12th, 2013 at 04:30 AM
“Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night.”
Last night on twitter, Dave Weigel of Slate noted he was just hearing from twitterers about the gruesome trial of Kermit Gosnell. Those who care about the story owe a tremendous debt to Kirsten Powers taking to the pages of USA Today to write about it.
It is fascinating how much of a bubble the media lives in with that bubble so DC-NYC centric. It is again one of the problems for news organizations like CNN as it tries to rebuild. With the exception of Fox News, the American news networks focus on the things people along the coast are interested in and not what people along the American river valleys are talking about.
In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.
In fairness to CNN, unlike many other mainstream media outlets, it covered the Gosnell arrest back in 2011, but moved on. Only Fox, which is the number one news network largely because it actually cares what people outside the DC-NYC bubble care about, has stayed with the story.
Gosnell is now on trial two years after his arrest. The stories coming from the trial via the few outlets willing to pay attention are horrific and gruesome. But what’s more, similar stories are trickling out from other abortion clinics. The uncommon barbarism of Kermit Gosnell’s clinic turns out to be more common than most might imagine.
But they won’t imagine it. Like with Dave Weigel from Slate, most reporters have never paid attention to the trial or the horrors of many abortion clinics. Reporters lean left, are sympathetic to abortion, and view the right’s demands for coverage unsympathetically because of the reporters’ biases.
Within the media coverage Gosnell is either a story they covered in 2011 or something they won’t cover at all. If they cover it now, they do so in passing so they can say they covered it. But they won’t devote the resources to it as they would if Gosnell had killed dogs. He only killed babies.
In Kirsten Powers column she noted
A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.
The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.
Liberals, and even reporters who try to be fair minded, often complain that conservative decided to leave and go do their own media thing with Fox, talk radio, etc. Well, this is an example of why conservatives had to do that. Otherwise many stories many Americans care about would never be told.
Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night through the course of the trial. It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news.
The rest of the story...
www.usatoday.com/story/op...ic-horror-column/2072577/
